It’s hard to believe that it’s been more than 3 years from the 1.0 release. It seems just yesterday we were putting together the first public beta and opening the first champagne, when Nathan Hamblen bought the first license 7 days later. Thanks to him and all of you, our loyal users, today the JRebel team proudly presents the 4.0 release.

The major features are:

Full support for reloading changes to EJBs 3.x. Including adding new components and adding @EJB references on-the-fly, across Weblogic, WebSphere, JBoss and Glassfish.

Support for anonymous class reloading. Previously adding a new anonymous class would cause the other ones to be renamed (Class$3 -> Class$4) and JRebel would complain that super class has changed and fail to reload. Never again.

Instrumentation/HotSwap integration. Although JRebel always used a -javaagent to bootstrap, it hasn’t actually used the Instrumentation API before. Now, on Java 5 or later, we make use of this functionality to minimize the runtime performance overhead and to further improve the debugging behaviour. This also lays ground for some future improvements.

Full Seam 2.x support. Now you can add new components and wire them in on-the-fly. Enjoy!

Better integration across the board. Hibernate Validator and Spring Security are the biggest names, but we have severely expanded our test suite with support for 35 frameworks not counting the server, standard and miscellaneous integrations.

And of course a score of smaller features and fixes as usual that you can find in changelog.

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